> With Android, vendors are still shipping devices with 2.3.
How is this bad? Do you realize that 4 months ago, 2.3 was the very latest Android version available for phones? Its successor, 4.0, was barely released in Nov 2011 (3.0 was for tablets only). A few months delay is perfectly understandable because vendors need time to customize, build, test, ship, and clear inventory levels of devices running the previous Android version.
> You could, in 2002, run the latest version of Office on all of their operating systems.
This statement does not prove that forward/backward compatibility is easy in Windows. How much time did Microsoft waste into making Office run flawlessly across a wide range of Windows versions? With an application the size of Office (30M lines of code), it is almost certain that it has hundreds, if not thousands, of workarounds for limitations or bugs affecting the oldest Windows versions that Office needed to support.
How is this bad? Do you realize that 4 months ago, 2.3 was the very latest Android version available for phones? Its successor, 4.0, was barely released in Nov 2011 (3.0 was for tablets only). A few months delay is perfectly understandable because vendors need time to customize, build, test, ship, and clear inventory levels of devices running the previous Android version.
> You could, in 2002, run the latest version of Office on all of their operating systems.
This statement does not prove that forward/backward compatibility is easy in Windows. How much time did Microsoft waste into making Office run flawlessly across a wide range of Windows versions? With an application the size of Office (30M lines of code), it is almost certain that it has hundreds, if not thousands, of workarounds for limitations or bugs affecting the oldest Windows versions that Office needed to support.